Overview

Cast of Shadows

This icily innovative thriller begins with every parent’s worst nightmare, when Davis Moore’s teenage daughter is brutally raped and murdered by an unknown assailant. It gets worse. For Davis Moore is a fertility doctor, dealing with cutting-edge genetic reproductive techniques. It’s a controversial and dangerous occupation: Moore has already been the object of a fanatic’s assassination attempt. But for a father driven half-mad by grief, his work presents one startling and dangerous opportunity–the chance to look into the face of his daughter’s killer.

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Davis Moore is a fertility doctor in Chicago specializing in reproductive
cloning. When his daughter is raped and murdered by an unknown assailant, he
entertains a monstrous thought...

The detective was polite each morning when he called, and Davis feigned
patience each morning when the detective, after small talk, confessed to having
no leads. Well, not zero leads, exactly: A profile had been made of the
attacker. The police believed he was white and fair-skinned. They had some
general idea about his size, based on the placement of the bruises and the force
exerted on her arm, breaking it in two, but that ruled out only the unusually
short and the freakishly tall. They did not think he was obese, according to
their reconstruction of the rape itself. He may or may not have been someone
Anna Kat knew-probably not, because if she had been expecting someone that night
she might have told somebody, but then again, who can say?

The Medical Examiner said the injuries were consistent with rape, but could
not comment on whether the District Attorney would include sexual assault along
with the murder charge when police apprehended a suspect. When Davis expressed
outrage after that information had appeared in the paper, the detective settled
him down and assured him that when a beaten, broken, strangled girl has fresh
semen inside her, that's a rape in the cops' book no matter what the M.E. says
and then he apologized for putting it that way, for being so goddamn
insensitive, and then Davis had to reassure the detective. That's all right. He
didn't want them to be sensitive. He wanted the police to be as angry and raw as
he was. The detective understood that the Moores wanted a resolution. "We know
you want closure, Dr. Moore, and so do we," he said. "Some of these cases take
time."

Often, the police told the Moores, a friend of the victim will think aloud
during questioning, "It's probably nothing, you know, but there's this strange
guy who was always hanging around..." This time, none of Anna Kat's friends
could offer even a cynical theory. Fingerprints were too plentiful to be useful
("It's the Gap," the detective said. "Everyone in town has had their palms on
that countertop") and they were sure the perpetrator had worn gloves anyway, by
the thickness of the bruises on her wrists and neck. Daniel Kinney, Anna Kat's
off-again boyfriend, was questioned three times. He was appropriately distraught
and cooperative, submitting to a blood test and bringing his parents, but never
a lawyer.

Blonde hairs were found at the scene and police determined they belonged to
the killer by comparing the DNA to his semen. With no suspect sharing those same
microscopic markers, however, the evidence was an answer to an unasked question.
A proof without hypothesis. Before or during the rape, she had been beaten.
During or possibly after the rape, she had been strangled. One arm and both legs
were broken. Seven hundred and forty nine dollars were missing from a pair of
registers and there might have been some clothes gone from the racks (the
embarrassed store manager wasn't sure about that, inventory being something of a
mess, but it's possible that a few pocket tees were taken. Extra Large. The
police noted this in their profile).

Northwood panicked for a few weeks. The bakery, True Value, Coffee Nook,
fruit stand, two ice cream parlors, six restaurants, three hairdressers, and two
dozen or so other shops, including the Gap, of course (but not the White Hen),
began closing at sundown. More spouses met their partners at the train, their
cars in long queues parallel to the tracks each night. The cops put in for
overtime, and the town borrowed officers from Glencoe. If you were under 18, you
were home before curfew. The Chicago and Milwaukee TV stations made camp for
awhile on Main Street (news producers determined that Oak Street, where the Gap
shared the block with a carpet store, parking lot, and funeral home, didn't
provide enough "visual interest" and chose to shoot stand-ups around the corner
where there was more pedestrian traffic and overall "quaintness"), but there
turns out to be a limit to the number of nights you can report that there is, as
yet, nothing to report, and TV crews disappeared as a group the day a
Northwestern basketball player collapsed and died of an aneurysm during
practice.

The old routine returned in time. By spring, Anna Kat might not have been
forgotten-what with the softball team wearing the "AK" patch, the special
appointment of Debbie Fuller to fill the vacancy of Student Council Secretary,
and the three-page, full-color yearbook dedication all keeping her top of mind
around campus-but Northwood became unafraid again. A horrible alien had killed
on its streets; Northwood had been shattered, and the people made repairs. The
town grieved and, like the alien, moved on.

Eighteen months after the murder, the detective told Davis (still calling
twice a week) that he could pick up Anna Kat's things. This doesn't mean were
giving up, he said. We have the evidence photographed, the DNA scanned. Phone
ahead and we'll have them ready. Like a pizza, Davis thought.

"I don't want to see them," Jackie said. You don't have to, he told her.

"Will you burn the clothes?" He promised he would.

"Will they ever find him, Dave?" He shook his head, shrugged, and shook his
head again.

He imagined a big room with rows of shelves holding boxes of carpet fibers
and photos and handwriting samples and taped confessions, evidence enough to
convict half the North Shore of something or other. He thought there would be a
window and, behind it, a chunky and gray flatfoot who would spin a clipboard in
front of him and bark, "Shine heah. By numbah fouwa." Instead, he sat at the
detective's desk and the parcel was brought to him with condolences, wrapped in
brown paper and tied with fraying twine.

He took it to his office at the clinic, closed the door, and cut the string
with a pair of long-handled stainless-steel surgical scissors. The brown postal
paper flattened into a square in the center of his desk and he put his hands on
top of the pile of clothes, folded but unwashed. He picked up her blouse and
examined the dried stains, both blood and the other kind. Her jeans had been
knifed and torn from her body, ripped from the zipper through the crotch and
halfway down the seams. Her panties were torn. Watch, ring, earrings, gold chain
(broken), anklet. There were shoes, black and low-heeled, which they must have
found near the body. With a shudder, Davis remembered those bare, mannequin
feet.

There was something else, too.

Inside one of the shoes: a small plastic vial, rubber-stoppered and sealed
with tape. A narrow sticker ran down the side with Anna Kat's name and a bar
code and the letters "UNSUB" written in blue marker, along with numbers and
notations Davis couldn't decipher. UNSUB, he knew, stood for "unidentified
subject" which was the closest thing he had to a name for his enemy.

He recognized the contents, however, even in such a small quantity.

It was the milky-white fuel of his practice, swabbed and suctioned from
inside his daughter's body. A portion had been tested, no doubt-DNA mapped-and
the excess stored here with the rest of the meager evidence. Surely they didn't
intend this to be mixed up in Anna Kat's possessions. This stuff, for certain,
did not belong to her.

He planned for a moment on returning to the police station and erupting at
the detective. "This is why you haven't found him! He's still out there while
you fumble around your desk, wrapping up tubes of rapist left-behind and handing
them out to the fathers of dead girls like Secret Santa presents!"

The stuff in this tube, ordinarily in his workday so benign, had been a
bludgeon used to attack his daughter, and his stomach could not have been more
knotted if Davis had discovered a knife used to slit her throat. He had often
thought of sperm and eggs-so carefully carted about the clinic, stored and
cooled in antiseptic canisters-as being like plutonium: with power to be
finessed and harnessed. The stuff in this tube, though, was weapons grade, and
the monster that had wielded it remained smug and carefree.

There was more. A plastic bag with several short, blonde hairs torn out by
the roots. These were also labeled UNSUB, presumably by a lab technician who had
matched the DNA from the follicles to genetic markers in the semen. There were
enough hairs to give Davis hope that AK had at least inflicted some pain, that
she had ripped these from his scrotum with a violent yank of her fist.

Rubbing the baggie between his fingers, Davis conjured a diabolical thought.
And once the thought had been invented, once his contemplation had made such an
awful thing possible, he understood his choices were not between acting and
doing nothing, but acting and intervening. By even imagining it, Davis had set
the process in motion. Toppled the first domino.

He opened a heavy drawer in his credenza and tucked the vial and the plastic
bag into the narrow space between the letter-sized hanging folders and the back
wall of the cabinet.

In his head, the dominoes fell away from him, out of reach, collapsing into
divergent branches with an accelerated tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

Justin Finn, nine pounds, six ounces, was born on March 2 of the following
year. Davis monitored the pregnancy with special care and everything had gone
almost as described in Martha's worn copy of What to Expect When You're
Expecting. There was a scary moment, in month six, when the child was thought to
be having seizures, but they never recurred. It was the only time between
fertilization and birth that Davis thought he might be exposed. Baby Justin
showed no evidence of brain damage or epilepsy, and after the Finns took their
happy family home, they sent Davis a box of cigars and a bottle of 25-year-old
Macallan.

The house on Stone fell into predictable measures of hostility and calm.
Davis and Jackie were frequently cruel to one another, but never violent. They
were often kind, but never loving. An appointment was made with a counselor but
the day came and went and they both pretended it had slipped their minds.

"I'll reschedule it," said Jackie.

"I'll do it," said Davis, generously relieving her of responsibility when the
phone call was never made.

In the third month of the Finn pregnancy, Jackie had left to spend time with
her sister in Seattle. "Just for a visit,"she said. Davis wondered if it were
possible their marriage could end this way, without a declaration, but with Joan
on a holiday from which she never returned. He didn't always send the things she
asked for-clothes and shoes, mostly-and she hardly ever asked for them twice.
Jackie continued to fill the prescriptions he sent each month along with a
generous check.

In Jackie's absence, Davis avoided social, or even casual, conversation with
Joan Burton. It had been fine for him to admire Dr. Burton, even to fantasize
about her when he could be certain nothing would happen. Throughout his
marriage, especially when Anna Kat was alive, Davis knew he was no more likely
to enter into an affair than he was apt to find himself training for a moon
mission, or playing fiddle in a bluegrass band. He wasn't a cheater, therefore
it was not possible that he could cheat. With Jackie away and their marriage
undergoing an unstated dissolution, he could no longer say a relationship with
Joan was impossible. He feared the moment, perhaps during a weekday lunch at
Rossini's, when their pupils might fix and the dominoes in his head would start
toppling again: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

Jackie returned just before Christmas as if that had been her intention all
along. She and Davis fell back into their marriage of few words. Davis restarted
the small talk with Joan, even buying her a weekday lunch at Rossini's.